this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
49 points (87.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43395 readers
1248 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't know. This is all new to me (and thank you for engaging with me and helping to educate), so I don't know what will incentivize or discourage people from shifting between communities, but based on what little I know, I don't see why they wouldn't since there is very little friction to doing so.
Your subreddit analogy feels very apt, actually. r/pics2 might be a graveyard, but I can think of two instances where part or most of a community moved to an alternate version of the subreddit, largely because they didn't like the moderation.
Go to r/Cubs, created September of 2008. It's got a reasonably healthy 28k subs, but the posts and comments are pretty lackluster and gamethreads are graveyards. Contrasted to r/ChiCubs, which was created 7 years later and has nearly 3x as many subs and is a much more active community - essentially this is the subreddit for Cubs baseball fans on reddit.
Very similar story in r/publicFreakout and r/Actualpublicfreakouts, the latter of which splintered off from the former on largely idealogical grounds.
Many people move between them, some people participate in both, and perhaps one day one of them will "win" if the other withers away.
It seems to me a similar dynamic could play out across instances of the same subreddit name if some old reddit power mods come and squat on communities before they are fully formed. To use a fake example, [email protected] vs [email protected]